Saturday, May 13, 2017

Threatening a former director of the FBI with secret tapes is like threatening Stephen Hawking with middle school math homework. I have no idea how the FBI would respond, but if they really took Donald Trump at his word, his Tweet as an invitation to spar, the ensuing rout will be more one-sided than a Möbius strip.

Britain’s sense of economic invulnerability is even more puzzling.
Why does a country that is significantly poorer than Germany, with fewer
internationally competitive industries and greater dependence on
foreign capital and managerial expertise, believe it can afford to quit
the single market? Britain’s economic performance is no better than
France’s and on some important measures – especially productivity – far
worse. Yet nobody from France’s political mainstream seriously thinks
that the French economy would thrive outside the EU.

Much of the British elite know little about how Britain’s economy
compares. Few realise that three-quarters of the country is poorer than
the EU-15 average;
that Britain’s growth performance has been mediocre at best; or that
there are relatively few British-owned and managed businesses with a
strong record of growth. There are bright spots in the British economy,
but its commanding heights owe much to foreign capital and expertise.
Foreign-owned businesses generate more than half the country’s exports,
and many of these exports are intermediate goods – links in
international, predominantly European, supply chains. These companies
are especially vulnerable to Britain leaving the single market. If the
British economy were more locally owned and managed, it would be easier
to understand the British complacency over the economic impact of
Brexit. But for a developed country so dependent on foreign capital to
do something so damaging to its ability to attract that capital has few
precedents.